Bases of Delusion: Washington’s stealth escalation of militarism

About a dozen air bases have been established in Africa since 2007, according to a former senior US commander involved in setting up the network.

By Danny Schechter

As I am sure you have noticed-as has everyone in the world---there is a financial crisis underway. Call it a recession or a depression it is clear that parts of our global system are in collapse mode. Governments are slashing benefits and social programs while cutbacks in the name of austerity are harming the people who are being hardest hit.

On the face of it, you would think this is not a time for governments to throw away billions on misguided military interventions. But once the word “national security” is invoked, partisan debate stops, and in the US, even strident Republican attacks on President Barack Obama go silent.

Where there was confrontation, there is now renewed consensus that the Military Industrial Complex must be fed (even as there is misleading talk about Pentagon cuts). With the GOP demanding that even more be spent, and the media not reporting where it goes, pillaging continues in the name of keeping us strong.

(If you buy that, I have a bridge to Brooklyn to sell you!)

A new report by auditors has found billions missing. It doesn’t seem to matter.

Reports CLG, “After years of following the paper trail of $51 billion in US taxpayer dollars provided to rebuild a broken Iraq, the US government can say with certainty that too much was wasted. But it can't say how much. In what it called its final audit report, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Funds on Friday spelled out a range of accounting weaknesses that put "billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of waste and misappropriation" in the largest reconstruction project of its kind in US history.”

The official reaction: Ho Hum.

Even as every news report details new setbacks in Afghanistan, Washington and its allies-or are they co-conspirators?-agree to $16 billion more to pour into a war that has encouraged looting by local elites and overbilling by contractors. We still don’t know where the billions stolen from the Bank of Kabul have gone. More telling, no one seems to really care.

And now the latest fad: new weapons systems are exciting the President and his opponents just like the iPAD is thrilling consumers. We are seeing an escalation---in cyber war, drones and the building of new bases.

These days, you don’t even need land to have a base on. The Navy has come up with a “floating base” that has moved into the Persian Gulf. We can safely predict that the Space Command has plans for bases in space to look after all the surveillance satellites that seem to be monitoring everything and everyone.

This has been years in the making. The late Chalmers Johnson warned of a new empire of bases twelve years ago, before 9/11 in 2000; He published an essay called “America’s Empire of Bases, in which he said, “Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.”

He just touched the surface. David Vine writes on the indispensable TomDispatch.com that that this put a base everywhere mentality is now a Pentagonian obsession.

“Unknown to most Americans, Washington’s garrisoning of the planet is on the rise, thanks to a new generation of bases the military calls “lily pads” (as in a frog jumping across a pond toward its prey). These are small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, Spartan amenities, and prepositioned weaponry and supplies.

Around the world, from Djibouti to the jungles of Honduras, the deserts of Mauritania to Australia’s tiny Cocos Islands, the Pentagon has been pursuing as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can. Although statistics are hard to assemble, given the often-secretive nature of such bases, the Pentagon has probably built upwards of 50 lily pads and other small bases since around 2000, while exploring the construction of dozens more.

As Mark Gillem, author of America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire, explains, “avoidance” of local populations, publicity, and potential opposition is the new aim. “To project its power,” he says, the United States wants “secluded and self-contained outposts strategically located” around the world. According to some of the strategy’s strongest proponents at the American Enterprise Institute, the goal should be “to create a worldwide network of frontier forts,” with the US military “the ‘global cavalry’ of the twenty-first century.”

If this doesn’t sound like a replay of the US-Indian wars, or the British Empire, what does?

According to the leader of the African National Congress in South Africa, "The US military is expanding its secret intelligence operations across Africa, establishing a network of small air bases to spy on terrorist hideouts from the fringes of the Sahara to jungle terrain along the equator, according to documents and people involved in the project.

At the heart of the surveillance operations are small, unarmed turboprop aircraft disguised as private planes. Equipped with hidden sensors that can record full-motion video, track infrared heat patterns, and vacuum up radio and cellphone signals, the planes refuel on isolated airstrips favored by African bush pilots, extending their effective flight range by thousands of miles.

About a dozen air bases have been established in Africa since 2007, according to a former senior US commander involved in setting up the network. Most are small operations run out of secluded hangars at African military bases or civilian airports.”

There used to be a phrase in wide use called “mission creep” that refers to how military missions expand when more money is thrown to them.

Now we have “Empire Creep,” ironically, overseen if not directed by a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and largely ignored by the media.

What history seems to show is that this new base fetishism is based on a false sense of unassailable US power that will in the end make the US weaker, not stronger.